Abstract
McGrath’s Heroic Kṛṣṇa, published by the Ilex Foundation, is a small and tightly focused monograph on the character Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa in the enormous Sanskrit epic poem the Mahābhārata. The Mahābhārata, which is thought to have emerged in its present form perhaps in roughly the 4th century CE, tells of the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. Kṛṣṇa is a central figure of this long and varied narrative, and is one of the most widely venerated deities in the Hindu tradition. McGrath’s concern in Heroic Kṛṣṇa is to strip Kṛṣṇa of the divinity with which he is endowed in the Mahābhārata, and to present us with what he takes to be the underlying “original” human hero figure embodying ancient Indo-Āryan virtues.
This is the third monograph from McGrath published in the Ilex series treating the Mahābhārata, the earlier two dealing with women and performance. As is indicated by the titles of these three books, as well as his 2004 Brill volume on the character Karṇa, his concern is with the “Epic Mahābhārata.” The Mahābhārata is of course nothing if not an epic, and there is nothing controversial in broadly designating the work as such. However, McGrath’s consistent qualification of the poem with this term in the titles of his works signals his highly selective reading of only those materials which he deems to be “epic.” This means throwing out as “late” or the product of “bricolage” (a term used constantly throughout) almost all of the material following the battle books (e.g. 48, note 10; 135, note 6), without providing a hint of argument or analysis to support this. The format of Heroic Kṛṣṇa is therefore an “explication de texte” (ix) composed of translated passages, commentary upon these passages, and summaries of other selected scenes, largely drawn from the “battle books.”
Each chapter focuses on one facet of Kṛṣṇa’s character: his close friendship with Arjuna (2. Two Kṛṣṇas); the alliance with the Pāṇḍavas and the nature of Kṛṣṇa’s political relationship with Yudhiṣṭhira (3. The Alliance); Kṛṣṇa’s function as diplomat and envoy to the Kauravas just prior to the war (4. The Embassy); Kṛṣṇa’s character as a charioteer (5. Kṛṣṇa Sārathi); and his role as advisor in military strategy (6. Strategy and Maneuver). The two final chapters (7. Aftermath, and 8. Death) briefly examine these roles and identities in the post-battle books, although once again the author generally dismisses this material as falling “outside” the epic (e.g. 109, note 13). In accordance with the volume’s general style of running commentary, no formal conclusions are offered beyond some brief thoughts appended to Chapter 8.
In my view, the positive contribution made by McGrath in Heroic Kṛṣṇa concerns the intersection of certain features of Kṛṣṇa’s character. The author stresses Kṛṣṇa’s tendency to speak, advise and counsel rather than act, fight or engage in the war physically. With this tendency McGrath associates Kṛṣṇa’s function as charioteer (sūta or sārathi) and friend to Arjuna during the war (charioteers traditionally do not fight and are theoretically untouchable on the battlefield; consequently they also play the role of bards who report the events of battle, from which they can return alive). McGrath remarks upon Kṛṣṇa’s uniquely aloof disposition towards the events of the narrative, noting that unlike most other characters he never grieves or experiences sorrow (32), but rather controls or engineers significant events through speech acts and through the manipulation of those who act on his counsel (98). This includes his counsel to Arjuna, political advice to and diplomatic representation as a dūta or messenger of the Pāṇḍavas, and promptings to violate the warrior code during the great battle. While, taken on their own, few of these observations are novel (Alf Hiltebeitel’s highly influential and widely read 1976 The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahābhārata comes immediately to mind; this is not referenced by McGrath), there is I think value in the way the author underlines the significance of and relationship between Kṛṣṇa’s roles as sūta and dūta, and how these roles seem to manifest themselves in Kṛṣṇa’s accomplishment of his purposes through speech rather than direct action.
By drawing out this portrait, however, it is not McGrath’s purpose to simply highlight some aspects of Kṛṣṇa’s complex character. Rather the author presents this human-heroic Kṛṣṇa to us as the “original” Kṛṣṇa of the ancient epic Mahābhārata. He sees in these features of Kṛṣṇa’s personality a set of ancient Indo-Āryan values, assuming that they have persisted throughout the poem’s growth and remodeling by Vaiṣṇava theologians and that they can be reclaimed by simply ignoring the material deemed a priori to be post-epic. All of this, in my view, is problematic, and a word is necessary here on the nature of the text under analysis in order to understand how it is that the author imagines such a “retrieval” to be possible.
The text under analysis is the Sanskrit Mahābhārata as reconstructed in the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute edition. This is a critically edited text and so while it is not the Ur- or original Mahābhārata, it represents the earliest form of the epic that can be inferred on the basis of extant manuscripts. Even this critically edited form of the poem appears to have a history of growth behind it, and it is accepted in much epic scholarship that higher textual criticism can arrive at persuasive arguments positing certain limited portions of the text as earlier or later than their immediately neighbouring material. In order for such arguments to be persuasive, substantial philological analysis is obviously necessary. In the absence of such data and argumentation, there is no basis for positing any portion of the text as any earlier or later than another—it must simply be accepted as a unit. One might have hunches about section X having been inserted at a late date between sections W and Y, but of course if this cannot be demonstrated or substantiated philologically, one must read W, X and Y as a piece.
McGrath proposes that he is undertaking a higher textual criticism, which uncovers an earlier form of Kṛṣṇa beneath later accretions. However, he offers no philological analysis of any kind—only a tightly closed circular argument. Convinced at the outset that the “real” or “original” Kṛṣṇa was not a god but a human hero, he proposes to cherry-pick out from the text the verses which he feels vindicate his position—verses he gives us no reason for isolating from their immediately neighbouring material, which clearly and unambiguously expresses the divinity of Kṛṣṇa. What is most surprising about this is the author’s candour about his circular method. In the book’s introduction, the author time and again declares without a trace of self-consciousness how his foregone conclusions will be proven through systematic dismissal of the disconfirming evidence that sits cheek by jowl with the verses that appeal to him: he states that he “will focus merely upon the heroic rather than the divine qualities of Kṛṣṇa, that is all” (7); “In this book I shall focus as much as possible on the former and heroic system of metaphors and song only and not give weight to ‘mahāyogi … hariḥ’ (the great yogī Hari; V.66.14), the Hindu aspect of divine Kṛṣṇa” (5, emphasis in the original); “[T]he claim that Kṛṣṇa is a mortal representative of the deity Viṣṇu in the epic is a premise that I exclude” (7). At these and many other points in the book, McGrath acknowledges that the Mahābhārata with which he is working understands Kṛṣṇa to be a divinity, and that he will simply ignore this material in order to prove his hypothesis: “We shall focus on Kṛṣṇa’s heroic nature, examining not the verses that concern the divine avatāra of a deity—neither Viṣṇu nor Nārāyaṇa—but the elements of the poem which relate to Kṛṣṇa the kṣatriya …” (6). Typically when a scholar is trapped in a circular argument he or she does not perceive or recognize it, but somehow McGrath seems very well aware that his conclusions are foregone and seems to feel no inhibitions in drawing attention to this fact.
While McGrath offers no philological evidence to defend his isolation of passages and rejection of others, he does make occasional attempts to bolster his anti-theistic reading of Kṛṣṇa: Kṛṣṇa’s worship of Śiva bespeaks an ancient kṣatriya cult (in which Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna are the human devotees and Śiva the deity, 34–35); Kṛṣṇa expresses reverence for the ancient sacrificial cult of the Vedas which preceded the formation of popular Hinduism, and so he cannot also be a Hindu deity (57, 139); Kṛṣṇa is fooled by Śālva’s māyā in the Saubhavadha episode and so must be human, “for if Kṛṣṇa were divine—as he later becomes—and was not merely heroic, he would not be subject to this kind of sensible trickery or illusion” (80). None of these arguments are persuasive, for the simple reason that all of these kinds of behaviour are repeated in the deeply devotional texts of the later Vaiṣṇava tradition such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. That is to say, even in the bhakti scriptures of medieval Hinduism in which Kṛṣṇa’s divinity is even more vigorously celebrated than in the Mahābhārata, Kṛṣṇa still venerates Śiva, still lauds the brahmin and his sacrifice (indeed Viṣṇu is the sacrifice already in the late Vedic literature preceding the emergence of the Mahābhārata), and can still appear to fall prey to illusion. McGrath is looking in vain for traction here in certain gestures of Kṛṣṇa which the later tradition shows to be entirely appropriate for a deity.
In the end what is perhaps most off-putting about this undertaking is its driving motivation. The author dismisses with a casual ease and perfunctoriness the Hindu understanding of Kṛṣṇa, and must imagine that he is engaged in a kind of work of debunking. McGrath seems driven to take up this burden to “rehabilitate” and civilize the half-devil and half-child Kṛṣṇa into a form that appeals to his sensibilities as a student of Greek Classics—sensibilities which are decidedly and openly anti-Hindu. The author is only interested in what he sees as a human “epic” hero, purified of later contaminating religious superfluities. Quite frankly I find in this retrograde mishandling of the poem and of the figure of Kṛṣṇa an unpleasant odour of the cultural imperialism of colonial indology—an odour which McGrath nonetheless wears proudly and openly like a perfume.
I do not reject the possibility that higher textual criticism can support hypotheses about the relative dating of certain sections of the poem. I also think it can be valuable to isolate certain features or aspects of epic characters as McGrath has done here, pointing to the features of Kṛṣṇa’s temporary function as charioteer during the war, his tendency to speak rather than act, his role as a diplomat, and the different timbres or flavours of the relationships he forges with Arjuna and Yudhiṣṭhira. There is in Heroic Kṛṣṇa, however, no work of higher textual criticism to speak of, and there are no grounds established here for taking these particular qualities of Kṛṣṇa’s character as somehow older or prior to the divine Kṛṣṇa, the manifestation on earth of the supreme Nārāyaṇa.
McGrath is not the first to deny the divinity of Kṛṣṇa. Within the Mahābhārata itself the evil Duryodhana and Śiśupāla do precisely this, being wilfully blind to Kṛṣṇa’s identity (they are, incidentally, schooled by a theophany and a decapitation, respectively). I believe it would be giving McGrath too much credit to charge him with wilful blindness, and it seems to me unlikely that the driving purpose and motivation behind this study is mere innocent academic curiosity. There is hope, however, for according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, even such enemies of Kṛṣṇa are blessed. In the end they attain the abode of the Lord, for animosity towards God is itself a salvific form of single-mindedness and bhakti.